Experience Report: Development and Utilisation of aseXML in the Energy Industry
Andrew Screen, Ashley M. Aitken, Sonya Rosbotham · Australian Software Engineering Conference · 2008
The enactment of competition policy in the 1990's resulted in the progressive introduction of Full Retail Contestability within the Gas and Electricity industries from around 2002 onwards. To facilitate the projected yearly customer churn of around 20% of the total customer base required the development of an effective communications infrastructure which could handle the significant information exchanges between participants in these markets in a timely manner. One of the key components of this was the development of aseXML (A Standard for Energy transactions in XML) which provides a conceptual framework for the exchange of information and the specification of a transaction set expressed in the language of XML schemas. The paper looks at some of the drivers and goals of the overall communications infrastructure implementation and a mixture of technical and management issues related to the development and maintenance of the aseXML. On a technical level, issues such as use of namespaces, enumerations, xsi types and the use of versioning for application control are discussed. On a management level, the need to maintain a technical standard capable of delivering the business content, but is independent of the individual technological choices made by users. Along with this with the need to accommodate the differences between Gas and Electricity, as well as variation within each of the industries, by providing a schema definition that is flexible, which has seen a trend to a less prescriptive schema definition